Ethereum Go: Gotta Fork Them All

The Ethereum hard fork went off without a hitch. If the Ethereum Foundation (EF) thought their bastard child Ethereum Classic (ETC) would die a swift death, they were mistaken.

ETC is the Ethereum chain that did not bail out the DAO. Remember the DAO, that game changing investment vehicle that had to be bailed out by big daddy Vitalik because of poorly written code? The Ethereum protocol was hard forked so that DAO Muppets could get back their ETH.

Many, including myself, assumed that no exchanges or miners would support ETC. After the hard fork, each ETH holder pre-fork was entitled to an equal balance of ETC. The only way ETC has value is if miners and exchanges support it. Miners do the computational work to support the network and earn newly created ETC, and exchanges provide liquidity so that miners can monetize their magic internet money.

Due to the rushed nature of the hard fork, proper documentation relating to securing ETC and preventing replay or double spend attacks was sparse. It was not in the EF’s interests to make it easy to accept and use ETC. The goal was to definitively hard fork, protecting both their public image and foolish investors in the DAO.

Phil Potter, CSO of Bitfinex, had this to say about how EF handled the hard fork:

“they don’t care about people who want to stay on the old chain and they certainly don’t give a shit about exchanges” … “so why they spend any of [their] treasure making anything easy for us” … “they only care about rescuing their precious DAO” … “I wish I never listed this piece of shit coin”

Hell hath no fury like a digital currency exchange scorned. The leading exchanges can make or break a coin. Without liquidity, a coin is nothing. The foundation is about to learn that the hard way as Poloniex and now Bitfinex will allow trading of ETC. Little birdies also tell me that Kraken will also list ETC.

The hash power of ETC is still considerably less than ETH, but now that the three leading ETH exchanges will list ETC, miners will have a financial incentive to mine ETC. ETC is exactly the same as ETH; therefore, if the profit margins are higher on ETC than ETH, miners will just point their machines at the ETC network.

Many in the Ethereum community opposed the hard fork. These traders will place ideology ahead of profits, and that is very positive for the staying power of ETC. Profitable ETC mining will only encourage them further.

For those traders who would like to trade ETC on leverage using only Bitcoin, BitMEX is proud to announce the launch of ETC24H. ETC24H is the BitMEX Ethereum Classic / Bitcoin 5x daily leveraged futures contract.

ETC24H expires each day at 12:00 UTC based on the 11:30 UTC to 12:00 UTC time weighted average price of the Poloniex ETC/BTC exchange rate. Each ETC24H contract is worth 1 ETC priced in Bitcoin.

Traders can now go long or short ETC. ETC24H is the only leveraged ETC product, and the only way to short ETC.